Complete and fast unknown tag identification in large RFID systems

The RFID technology greatly improves efficiency of many applications including inventory control, object tracking, and supply chain management. In such applications, it is common that new objects are added into the system or existing objects are misplaced in wrong regions. When this happens, fast and complete identification of such tags is very important. We name this problem unknown tag identification, as these tags appear to be unknown by the reader(s) currently covering them. In this paper, we propose a series of protocols to identify unknown tags completely and fast. In these protocols, we develop several novel techniques to efficiently resolve collisions caused by known tags when identifying unknown tags, which greatly improve the time efficiency. To our knowledge, this is the first work that completely identify all the unknown tags with deterministic approaches. Simulation results show the superior performance of the proposed protocols: Compared with a baseline method which collects IDs of all the tags in the system, our best protocol reduces the execution time by 63% in average and by 85% at most.